Yet I am slightly confused. I also learned this week that "Rabbi Dov Lior, another genius Talmud scholar, announced that Jewish Law prohibits sterile couples from conceiving using non-Jew's sperm, as it causes adverse traits. According to Rabbi Lior, a baby born through such an insemination will have the "negative genetic traits that characterize non-Jews."

At the conclusion of prayers, eight
major state-funded rabbis ambled up to the platform above the crowd,
most representing an official yeshiva from a settlement or major Israeli
city. With their long, gray beards, black suits, black fedoras, and
wizened appearances, they looked as though they had been lifted from the
imagination of some deranged anti-Semite. And here they were to defend a
book that openly justified the mass slaughter of gentile babies, though
to be sure, not all were willing to say that they agreed with its
contents. The only point the rabbis agreed on, at least openly, was that
the state should never scrutinize or punish the speech of religious
authorities. With their penchant for firebreathing tirades against
Arabs, homosexuals, and other evildoers, these rabbis knew they were
next in line if Shapira and Elitzur were officially prosecuted.

Yaakov
Yosef was escorted into the gathering by Baruch Marzel, a notoriously
violent leader of the Jewish terrorist group, Kach. Up at the podium,
Yosef hailed Marzel as a “gever,” or a great man of honor. Yosef was the
son of Ovadiah Yosef, the spiritual guide of the Shas Party and former
Chief Sephardic Rabbi of Israel. Despite Ovadiah Yosef’s penchant for
outrageous ravings (“Goyim were born only to serve. Without that, they
have no place in the world,” he proclaimed in a weekly sermon), he
opposed the publication of Torat Ha’Melech, calling it “racist”
and dangerous to Israel’s international image. But since joining the
extremist, cultic Jewish sect of Chabad, Yaakov had taken on a decidely
more radical posture than his father. (Elitzur was a Chabad rabbi.)

In his speech, Yosef attempted to couch Torat Ha’Melech
within the mainstream tradition of the Torah. Quoting from Psalms
Chapter 79 in order to demonstrate the book’s supposed consistency with
established Halakhic teachings, Yosef declared, “Pour out your wrath on
the nations that do not acknowledge you, on the kingdoms that do not
call on your name; for they have devoured Jacob and destroyed his
homeland.” He then reminded his audience of the Passover tale. “We asked
the Jewish people, ‘You don’t want to read from the Hagadah at the
Passover table [citing the slaughter of non-Jews]? Does anyone want to
change the Bible or the statements of the Torah?” Shapira and Elitzur’s
only crime, Yosef claimed, was remaining faithful to the oral and
written statements contained in the Torah.

Next, Rabbi
Haim Druckman, rose to speak. A former member of Knesset and winner of
the 2012 Israel Prize for education, Druckman was a figurehead of Jewish
extremism in Israel. In 1980, after a group of settlers embarked on a
semi-successful terror plot to maim the leading Palestinian mayors of
the West Bank (they crippled the mayors of Nablus and Ramallah),
Druckman celebrated: “Thus may all of Israel’s enemies perish!” Hunched
over the podium, the hoarse-throated Druckman was careful to avoid
endorsing the contents of Torat Ha’Melech, volunteering only
that he “hope[d] what happened here will end soon and that we will never
have to make such conferences again.”

A more strident
statement of support came from Rabbi Yehoshua Shapira, head of the
state-sponsored yeshiva in the Tel Aviv suburb of Ramat Gan. Yehoshua
Shapira bellowed, “The obligation to sacrifice your life is above all
others when fighting those who wish to destroy the authority of the
Torah. It is not only true against non-Jews who are trying to destroy it
but against Jewish people from any side.”

Outside the
conference hall, where the Kahanist Knesset member Michael Ben-Ari
milled around with Baruch Marzel and Itamar Ben-Gvir, another aide he
pulled from the ranks of Kach, Yossi and I chatted with a 22-year-old
settler who spoke to us in an American accent. We demanded to know if he
was willing to defend the provisions in Torat Ha’Melech
justifying the murder of innocent children. Without hesitation or any
initial shame, the young man, who refused to give his name, told us,
“There is such a concept in Jewish law as an enemy population, and under
very, very specific circumstances, according to various rabbinic
opinions, it would be seemingly permissible to kill, uh, uh....” For a
moment, he trailed off, and his eyes darted around the room. But the
settler managed to collect himself and complete his statement. “To kill
children,” he muttered uncomfortably.

The genocidal philosophy expressed in Torat Ha’Melech
emerged from the fevered atmosphere of a settlement called Yitzhar
located in the northern West Bank near the Palestinian city of Nablus.
There, Shapira helps lead the settlement’s Od Yosef Chai yeshiva,
holding sway over a small army of fanatics eager to terrorize the
Palestinians tending to their crops and livestock in the valleys below
them. Shapira was raised in an infl uential religious nationalist
family. Like Yaakov Yosef, he took a radical turn after joining the
Chabad sect under the tutelage of Rabbi Yitzchok Ginsburgh, the director
of Yitzhar’s Od Yosef Chai yeshiva who defended seven of his students
who murdered an innocent Palestinian girl by asserting the superiority
of Jewish blood. In 1994, when the Jewish fanatic Baruch Goldstein
massacred 29 Palestinian worshippers at the Cave of the Patriarchs in
Hebron, Ginsburgh lionized Goldstein in a lengthy article titled
“Baruch, Hagever,” or “Baruch, the Great Man.” Ginsburgh cast
Goldstein’s murder spree as an act consistent with core Halakhic
teachings, from the importance of righteous revenge to the necessity of
the “eradication of the seed of Amalek.”

Under the
direction of Ginsburgh and Shapira, Od Yosef Chai has raked in nearly
$50,000 from the Israeli Ministry of Social Affairs since 2007. The
Israeli Ministry of Education has supplemented the government’s support
by pumping over $250,000 into the yeshiva’s coffers between 2006 and
2007. Od Yosef Chai has also benefited handsomely from donations from a
tax-exempt American non-profit called the Central Fund of Israel.
Located inside the Marc Brothers Textiles store in Midtown Manhattan,
the Central Fund transferred at least $30,000 to Od Yosef Chai between
2007 and 2008. (Itamar Marcus, the brother of Central Fund founder
Kenneth, is the director of Palestine Media Watch, a pro-Israel
organization ironically dedicated to exposing Palestinian incitement).
In April 2013, the Israeli government finally announced it would cease
funding Od Yosef Chai, citing the yeshiva as a threat to public safety.

Though
he did not specify the identity of the non-Jewish “enemy” in the pages
of his book, Rabbi Shapira’s longstanding connection to terrorist
attacks against Palestinian civilians exposes the true identity of his
targets. In 2006, another rabbi in Shapira’s yeshiva, Yossi Peli, was
briefly held by Israeli police for urging his supporters to murder all
Palestinian males over the age of 13. Two years later, Shapira was
questioned by Shin Bet under suspicion that he helped orchestrate a
homemade rocket attack against a Palestinian village near Nablus. Though
he was released, Shapira’s name arose in connection with another act of
terror, when in January 2010 the Israeli police raided his settlement
seeking the vandals who set fire to a nearby mosque. After arresting 10
settlers, the Shin Bet held five of Shapira’s confederates under
suspicion of arson. None ever saw the inside of a prison cell.

Asked
if the students at the Oded Yosef Chai yeshiva were taking the law into
their own hands in attacking Palestinians, one of Shapira’s colleagues,
Rabbi David Dudkevitch, replied, “The issue is not taking the law into
our hands, but rather taking the entire State into our hands.”

Jewish
settler violence has been a fact of life in the occupied West Bank
since the 1970s. Since 2007, however, settler violence has spiked
dramatically. A 2008 article in Ha’aretz attributed the rise in attacks
to the 2005 withdrawal of settlers from the Gaza Strip, after which West
Bank settlers vowed to answer each state action against them by with a
“price tag” assault on Palestinians, thus establishing a deterrent
“balance of terror.”

But a detailed analysis of
documented settler attacks that occurred during the past decade by the
Washington-based research institute, the Palestine Center revealed the
violence as structural, not reactive. Staged without pretext and most
frequently in West Bank areas under Israeli security control, the
settlers acted without restraint. The report identified northern
settlements such as Yitzhar as hotbeds of violent activity, with
shooting attacks and arson on the rise. According to Yesh Din, an
Israeli human rights group, the Israeli police closed 91 percent of
investigations into settler attacks without indicting anyone, and
usually failed to locate the suspects.

According to a
March 2011 Ynet-Gesher poll of 504 Israeli adults, 48 percent of
Israelis supported settler violence in retaliation to Palestinian or
Israeli government actions, with only 33 percent stating their belief
that settler violence was “never justified.” While a vast majority of
Orthodox and religious nationalist respondents expressed strong support
for settler attacks, 36 percent of secular Israelis did as well—a
remarkably high number for a population that lives primarily inside the
Green Line.

While Ginsburgh and Shapira provided the
halakhic seal of approval for settler rampages in the north of the West
Bank, in the south, their comrade, Dov Lior, the chief rabbi of Hebron,
has cheered on the murder of anyone, Jew or non-Jew, who appeared to
interfere with the redemptive cause of Greater Israel. At the funeral
for Baruch Goldstein, Lior extolled the mass killer as “a righteous man”
who was “holier than all the martyrs of the Holocaust.” Thanks in part
to Lior’s efforts, a shrine to Goldstein stands inside the Jewish
settlement of Kiryat Arba, where Lior presides over the yeshiva. At the
same time, Lior pronounced Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin a moser (a Jew
who snitches to the goyim) and a rodef (a traitor worthy of
elimination), helping establish the religious justification for Yigal
Amir, one of Lior’s admirers, to assassinate him.

Lior’s
penchant for overheated, fascistic tirades has not diminished with age.
He has warned Jewish women not to allow in vitro fertilization with the
sperm of non-Jews, claiming that “gentile sperm leads to barbaric
offspring,” described Arabs as “evil camel riders” and said captive
Palestinian militants could be used as subjects for live human
experiments. The short, gray-bearded rabbi has even held forth on the
evils of “boogie woogie,” declaring that rock and roll “expresses
people’s animalistic and lower urges.” He added, “Something that belongs
to the rhythms of kushim [Negroes] does not belong in our world.”

Thanks
to the growing corps of religious nationalist youth signing up for army
service after studying in hesder yeshivas, or institutions of religious
learning that train young men for the military, Lior has secured
considerable influence inside the military. In 2008, when the chief
rabbi of the Israeli army, Brigadier General Avichai Ronski, brought a
group of military intelligence officers to Hebron for a special tour, he
concluded the day with a private meeting with Lior, who was allowed to
regale the officers with his views on modern warfare, which includes
vehement support for the collective punishment of Palestinians. Ronski,
for his part, has overseen the distribution of extremist tracts to
soldiers during Operation Cast Lead, including “Baruch, Hagever,” and a
pamphlet stating, “When you show mercy to a cruel enemy, you are being
cruel to pure and honest soldiers.”

In October 2009, a
group of soldiers from the army’s notoriously abusive Shimshon Battalion
upheld a protest banner vowing to refuse orders to evacuate settlements
during a swearing-in ceremony at the Western Wall—“Shimshon does not
expel.” When the army punished the two soldiers who organized the
display of disloyalty by ejecting them from the unit, rabbis Ginsburgh
and Lior promptly planned a religious revival in Jerusalem in their
honor. A source told the Jerusalem Post that the ceremony would include
the mass distribution of the newly published Torat Ha’Melech.
Weeks after the incident, two more major Israeli army brigades, Nahson
and Kfir, decorated their training bases with banners announcing their
refusal to evacuate settlements.

Less than two years
later, Matanya Ofan, the cofounder of a Jewish extremist media outlet
based in Yitzhar, appeared in a viral online video in full army uniform,
cradling an army-issued M-16 in one hand and a copy of Torat Ha’Melech
in the other. The book had come to represent the unofficial code of the
religious nationalist soldier. Staring into the camera, Ofan declared,
“When I come at the border, with God’s grace, I will not listen to the
nonsense that the commanders will tell me, and if I see an enemy coming
towards the border I will do anything to stop him from passing and I
will try and harm him—because this is how we can save the lives of the
Jews. Only this way no Sudani or Syrian will get to Tel Aviv.” A caption
at the end of the video read, “Jews, let’s win.”

By
this time, the ranks of the army were overrun by religious nationalists,
with more than a third of infantry officers expressing a right-wing
religious point of view—a 30 percent jump since 1990. A 2010 study
showed that 13 percent of company commanders lived in West Bank
settlements. The army’s second-in-command, Deputy Chief of Staff Yair
Naveh, was the first religious officer appointed to a position on the
General Staff. He was also the officer implicated in the Anat Kamm
scandal for ordering the assassination of Palestinian militants in
flagrant violation of a Supreme Court ruling.

Another
prominent religious Zionist was Yaakov Amidror, the former director of
the analysis wing of the army’s military intelligence and commander of
its officer academies. A settler with a puffy white beard, Amidror was
appointed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to serve as the director
of his National Security Council. Besides advocating the reoccupation of
the Gaza Strip, Amidror stirred controversy by calling for summary
executions of Israeli soldiers who refused to advance in battle, and for
using disproportionate force against the enemy’s civilian population.

“What
should be said is, kill more of the bastards on the other side, so that
we’ll win. Period,” he bellowed during a panel discussion on “National
Values in the Israel Defense Forces.”

While Amidror’s views appeared to dovetail with some of those of the authors of Torat Ha’Melech,
he did not dare defend them. This was a job for rabbis Lior and Yaakov
Yosef, who became the most prominent apologists, if not the most
enthusiastic boosters, of Torat Ha’Melech. In early 2011, with
the controversy over the book still raging across Israel, Yosef and Lior
provided the supreme rabbinical stamp of approval: a haskama, the kind
of endorsement provided at the preface of Judaic works by scholars
testifying to their halakhic value and the veracity of their contents.

“I
was gladdened, seeing this wonderful creation,” Lior said of the book.
That February, the minister of Internal Security issued an arrest
warrant for Lior after he refused to come in for questioning on
suspicion of incitement to racism, a crime in Israel that is seldom
punished, but which carries a penalty of as much as five years in
prison. Lior rejected the state’s order on the grounds that he had no
obligation to abide by its rules; the Torah itself was being put on
trial, he claimed.

Thus the self-proclaimed voice of Judaism in its purest form placed himself above the law.

Meanwhile,
the arrest order provoked calls for total resistance from right-wing
members of Knesset like Yaakov Katz, who said the government was
behaving like the “dark regimes” that persecuted Jews throughout
history, casting the attorney general in the role of Nazis and Pharoahs.
Twenty-four members of Netanyahu’s coalition, including David Rotem,
the chair of the Knesset’s Constitution, Law and Justice Committee,
joined Katz in denouncing Lior’s arrest. Both chief rabbis of Israel,
Yona Metzger and Shlomo Amar, issued a joint statement denouncing the
arrest of a man they called “one of Israel’s greatest rabbis.”

The
religious right’s ire exploded at a boisterous protest outside the
Supreme Court in July 2011, with hundreds of young settlers breaching a
wall outside the courthouse and attempting to storm the building. That
same month, when two right-wing activists were caught breaking into his
home, Shai Nitzan, the deputy state prosecutor, was forced to travel
with a special security detail.

In May 2012, the
government buckled under unrelenting pressure—the right-wing caved to
the far-right—with Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein ruling that he had
insufficient evidence to conclude that Torat Ha’Melech incited
racism, mainly because the book was written in a “general manner.” Lior
walked free along with the book’s authors, Shapira and Elitzur,
consolidating their political dominance while ensuring that the tract
they produced would continue circulating freely within the ranks of the
army. Astonished by the state’s decision, Sefi Rachlevsky, a liberal
columnist for Ha’aretz, pronounced Lior “the ruler of Israel.”

Having
successfully exerted its influence on the military and the justice
system, the religious right set out into mixed cities across Israel to
promote segregation and punish miscegenation in a campaign that spread
block by block, street by street.